Artist Statement
Papermaker / Visual Artist
Donna Allgaier-Lamberti
My work is
about coaxing something spiritual out of raw materials found in
nature. I consider my art just this – an ongoing dialog with plants.
I live a life
close to the earth, which provides much of my summer food and the
plants I use in my handmade papers. I see nature as a force greater
than myself and my work as a way to communicate a deep respect for
the land and its gifts to us. Each day in the studio I re-open this
dialog with the plant materials and see where this conversation
leads me. And, on a good day, if I am lucky I begin to translate the
language of the leaves.
My love affair
with paper began more than fifteen years ago when I wanted to
transfer my photographic images onto handmade paper. I was not able
to find the kind of paper I desired and began, to make my own. Today
this affair continues each time I plunge my hands into the earth to
grow or harvest the plants that becomes my beautiful, highly
textured paper. Using only responsible plant gathering ethics use
common native plants like hosta, iris, day lily, pampas and ribbon
grass, sunflower, chicory, herbs and lily of the valley and
more.
Also as part of
my repertoire, I collect from nearby fields, roadsides and marshes.
Cattails and red willow come from the marsh and milkweed and yucca
from the meadow, ferns and birch bark from the woods and rivers. I
use leaves, stems, stalks or petals.
Using an 8-step
hands-on, laborious process (gather, sort, cut, soak, rinse, cook,
rinse again and finally beat) to turn the natural plant materials
into pulp which is then formed into sheets of highly textured papers
that form the layers of my artwork. Most of my sheets contain a
minimum of three to five plants materials per sheet. (A canvas piece
easily represents over 100 hours of plant preparation
alone.)
I am quite particular what I use in my work, creating
only archival pulps that have been made from scratch with a
Hollander beater. My plants are added to a 5% base of cotton linter
and abaca (from the banana leaf plant) with kozo or flax used
occasionally for a special effect. I only work with pigments in my
color fibers that are light fast. My papers come from plants, held
together with cellulose from the plant itself. We sometimes believe
that paper is fragile but actually, it has great
strength.In the
contemplative, “Earth Element Series,” the final collage
adornment includes image transfers of my own photographs, leaves,
twigs, roots, stones, and other natural materials gathered from my
daily walk and work in the garden.
In the body of
work called, “Dialog With Plants” I use imagery and ideas
drawn from the natural world and workout my concerns with what I
view as mankind's abuse of the environment.
Each finished
work is the mother of the ones to follow. Ideas are studied and
dealt with, and like a scientist, I often uncover more than I can
resolve. My interdependent relationship to the materials I use, the
rhythm of my daily life in the out-of-doors and in the studio is the
motor that drives my creative spirit.
A deep respect
for nature, preservation of the land and its resources and the human
connection to the natural world are my underlying themes.
-Donna Allgaier-Lamberti
Click here to learn about Donna's paper-making
technique